Reality Czech is an openly licensed online curriculum for beginning to intermediate-level Czech students. The course aims to be a highly communicative introduction to Czech language and culture and includes over 240 interview compilation videos shot in the style of a reality TV show on a variety of everyday topics such as daily schedule, hobbies, food and drink, studies, holidays, health, weather, and more.

The name Reality Czech reflects not only the centrality of these interviews to the curriculum, but also the textbook’s focus on the vocabulary and constructions Czechs frequently use to talk about everyday topics. The entire course has been shaped by the language used in the interview videos as well as openly licensed content sourced from the internet.

Each of the 10 units follows a sequence of pre-class, in-class, and post-class activities ideal for a flipped classroom:

- Pre-class activities such as Quizlet vocabulary activities, video and audio with comprehension questions, culture notes, and grammar exercises introduce students to new language.
- An activity book for in-class use provides all of the resources an instructor needs to create a communicative classroom experience focused around task-based learning, such as games and activities.
- Post-class activities use both exercises and authentic multimedia texts as a catalyst for students to create language.

The materials all exist natively online in flexible formats such as Google Docs, and are licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, allowing the curriculum to be easily adapted to 100% online delivery.

COERLL has partnered with Rose Potter and Betsy Arnold to publish Recorridos-Don Quijote, a pair of openly-licensed books for the study of Cervantes’ Don Quijote in upper level Spanish courses, including AP. The student workbook, accessible online for free, deepens students’ understanding of the text through reading, pre-reading, and post-reading activities and glosses. The companion teacher support facilitates the teaching of Don Quijote through student-centered strategies and activities, historical and cultural information, quizzes, exams and more.

Academic libraries are undergoing evolutionary change as emerging technologies and new philosophies about how information is created, distributed, and shared have disrupted traditional operations and services. Additionally, the population that the academic library serves is increasingly distributed due to distance learning opportunities and new models of teaching and learning. This article, the first in this special issue, suggests that in today’s increasingly networked and distributed information environment, the strategic integration of open curation and collection development practices can serve as a useful means for organizing and providing structure to the diverse mass of available digital information, so that individual users of the library have access to coherent contexts for meaningful engagement with that information. Building on insights from extant research and practice, this article proposes that colleges and universities recognize a more inclusive open access environment, including the integration of resources outside of those owned or created by the institution, and a shift toward policies that consider open access research and open educational resources as part of the library’s formal curatorial workflow and collection building. At the conclusion on this article, authors Lisa Petrides and Cynthia Jimes offer a commentary on the six remaining articles that comprise this special issue on Models of Open Education in Higher Education, discussing the significant role that “open” policy and practice play in shaping teaching, learning, and scholarship in the global context of higher education.

This book is a practical guide to adapting or creating open textbooks using the Pressbooks platform. It is continually evolving as new information, practices and processes are developed. The primary audience for this book is community members at Ryerson University, Ontario who are interested in creating Open Educational Resources; however, there may be content within this book that is useful to others working on similar Open Educational Resource initiatives.

A template for developing openly licensed educational resources from Grossmont Union High School District.

Throughout this OER Community Course space, we have talked about the benefits that OER bring to students, faculty, and institutions as a whole. Research shows us that the most direct positive impacts are reduced costs of a college education, improved student success rates, and increased student retention.

As you work to integrate OER into your practice, keep in mind the ways you can share the OER you create, as well as your own personal stories which can help promote the adoption, adaption, customization, creation, and sharing of OER by others.

A brief video where OER experts give their reasons for working in the field of Open Educational Resources. Primary reasons include empowering teachers, equalizing access to education, reducing teachers' worries about copyright, reducing educational costs, and facilitating the open flow of information.

Few areas in our world today remain untouched by the influence of the new technology and its impact on education. Teachers must now devise new strategies for teaching and the exchange of information in classrooms with a view to improving Literacy and the comprehension of English among speakers of English-based creoles.

We advocate research and experimentation with digital tools as one of the ways of involving young teachers in possible projects that will challenge their own Literacy as well as that in the wider society.

THIS COLLECTION of articles was sourced on the Connexions server with precisely this aim in mind. The first article on the history of Literacy and the evolution of the Connexions (OER) model gives us the signal that the proliferation of digital tools and their use in education will radically alter the face of teaching and learning in the coming decades. The second article explores the topic of the changing learning styles of digital learners. We are in for an educational adventure that has implications for the way Literacy can grow and be a source of enjoyment among dialect speakers of English. These articles form a framework for an exploration of how digital tools can be used to enhance Literacy on our campus.

The COLLECTION will be used for a discussion of the issues in workshops and as supplemental reading in Literacy related courses. It has evolved out of an initial exploration of the topic of technology and Literacy. Our hopes that it will attract attention and feedback from others in the field of Literacy and the new technology.